


Knit One, Purl Two

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Protective Dean Winchester, Protective Jack Kline, Protective Mary Winchester, Protective Sam Winchester, The Winchesters Get Nice Things (For Once), Worried Castiel (Supernatural), Worried Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 07:58:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18426342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: When Cas tells Dean that some of the refugees in the bunker appear to bestalkinghim, Dean is pissed: because, a), their angel is off limits and he honestly thought he’d made that clear, and, b), he’s very surprised at the identities of the stalkers.But not everything is as it seems.





	Knit One, Purl Two

**Author's Note:**

> No angels are harmed in the telling of this story. Slightly freaked out, but well taken care of by their fam :)

“What do you think?”

Dean paused in the middle of carefully opening his own parcel to see Sam standing next to the library table, arms spread, grinning like a kid on Christmas morning.

“Spoiler alert,” he bitched, light heartedly, and chuckled as Sam did a slow turn to show off his jumper. “Yeah, okay. If there’s a shortage in yarn around here, we know who to blame.”

Sam flipped him off, and then sat down to watch Dean unpick the knotted string and then set it aside to unwrap his own gift.

“We on a reduce-reuse-recycle drive?”

Dean shrugged, attention focused on his task. A lot of care had gone into wrapping what he now suspected to be a sweater like Sam’s (maybe two sizes and a few hundred balls of yarn smaller), and it seemed wrong to just rip it open.

“It’s the end of the world, Sammy,” he said. “And for once it’s not on us. Well, not _just_ us.”

He folded the paper back neatly and picked up a dark green sweater with a ribbed collar and cuffs that looked cosy enough to wear on the coldest days.

“Man, those ladies,” he said, and carefully closed up the parcel again.

“I know,” Sam said. “They didn’t have to do that.”

No, they didn’t, but Dean appreciated the gesture all the same. Muriel, and her little knitting club, as she called them, were the oldest of the refugees they’d rescued from that dead world through the portal.

Dean and Sam had sat and listened, one night, as the women had told them how they’d already been friends when the angels came to destroy the world, and though their numbers had been whittled down in the years since, they’d managed to stick together.

And it had been a chill night, and the ladies had been wrapped in blankets, and Muriel had seen Dean shiver, and that, he supposed, had been the start of their top secret ‘Knit Jumpers for the Winchester Brothers’ plot.

He’d wondered why they kept tagging along whenever either they, or Mary, were going into town, and returned with bags clutched tightly closed and why their mom had told them the lower level dungeon was now completely off limits.

“They could give Ketch lessons in all that _James Bond_ shit,” Dean said.

Sam gave him a disapproving look.

Dean just stared back. “It’s okay to swear in the presence of their jumpers, Sam. I don’t think they’ll feel it through the force, or anything.”

His little brother shrugged and rubbed his fingers up the sleeve of his own red woollen present. 

Dean didn’t tease him, seeing how genuinely touched Sam was by the gift. It wasn’t often they got given anything by anybody; before Mary came back, it was pretty much Bobby, or Cas, and even since their mother’s return, she hadn’t been…

Dean quashed that thought. Their mother was her own person, and maybe she hadn’t turned out to be who Dean remembered (although he was coming to the conclusion that the person he remembered didn’t actually exist), but they loved her all the same, and they didn’t need her knitting them jumpers to prove that she loved them.

They already knew and, besides, he didn’t actually think she _could_ knit. Could probably gut somebody with the needles, though.

Still, Dean was unashamedly touched by Muriel’s, and her friends’, gifts, and he realised that, when they finally moved on, he was going to miss them.

++

Two days later, Cas knocked at Dean’s bedroom door, and came in, looking...worried.

Dean was lying on his bed, reading a journal from one of the first Men Of Letters to inhabit the bunker after it was built, but he got up when he saw Cas’s face.

“Hey, what’s up?”

Cas closed the door behind him. “I…”. He looked away, as if suddenly embarrassed. “No, it’s fine. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

Dean caught hold of his arm before Cas could leave. “Cas, c’mon. It’s not _fine_. Something’s got you spooked.”

He tugged Cas over to the bed and got him to sit down.

“Spill,” he said.

Cas sighed. “You know angels aren’t...popular among the people we rescue from that other Earth.”

Dean felt his temper start to rise. Yeah, he knew it. He couldn’t blame them, not for hating the angels who’d destroyed their world.

But _Cas_ wasn’t one of those angels, and Dean had already had words with a few of the refugees and made it clear that the bunker was Cas’s home. They were guests, and if they had a problem with Cas, they could get the hell out or even go back to where the angels truly were assholes in case they needed some for comparison.

He’d hoped, maybe foolishly, that would be it. Message delivered, received, understood.

“Who’s been bothering you?”

Cas was about to answer when he froze, head cocked as if he’d heard something. He got up, cat-quiet, and beckoned Dean to follow.

Dean crept after him and held back enough to let Cas very slowly, carefully, quietly, open his door just enough for Dean to peer out into the corridor.

From there, he could see the end, just past the corner. Sure enough, someone was there, peeking back at them, but probably unaware they were being watched since the door was barely open a crack.

Dean caught a glimpse of grey hair, a pair of familiar looking spectacles, and what looked like…

The figured darted back suddenly, and Dean closed the door over, and turned to lean against it.

Dammit.

Cas looked worried. “Dean? Are you alright?”

Dean sighed. That had definitely been a tweed skirt he’d seen, and he only knew one person in the bunker who wore skirts at all, let alone _tweed_ ones.

“Yeah, Cas. Just...disappointed.”

++

He had Mary and Jack stick close to Cas the next day, without making it too obvious they were body-guarding him, but Dean needed to know their angel was being watched over while he went to speak to his brother.

Sam, maybe unsurprisingly, didn’t seem to believe him. At first.

“Muriel? Knitting Club Muriel? Stalking Cas?”

Dean nodded. “Yeah, I know, least likely to be a mad angel-hating groupie, huh. But I saw her, Sam. And you know what else? It looked like she had a pair of those holy oil glasses we souped up to find that hellhound.”

Sam winced, and Dean wanted to kick himself for bringing that up.

“So. You think she’s using them to what? There aren’t any hellhounds in the bunker, Dean.”

“She wasn’t hunting hell hounds,” Dean protested. She’d followed their angel to Dean’s room. “She’s hunting _Cas_.”

Sam clearly didn’t think there was too much of a threat present in a seventy year old woman who knew how to cast on-cast off, but when it came to his family Dean was done taking chances.

++

He worked at Sam until his brother came around, and they spent the next couple of days watching the knitting club while Mary and Jack kept an eye on Cas.

It turned out they ended up keeping an eye on Cas, too, because where the angel seemed to go in the bunker, at least one of the ladies seemed to follow.

And more than once, they were wearing a pair of those glasses. (That night, Mary admitted to showing them the armoury, they were so sweet and curious, and when the brothers went to check, sure enough those sweet curious old ladies had pilfered every single pair).

Dean wasn’t sure what use the glasses were to them if they were fixated on their angel, but it couldn’t be anything good.

And they were taking it in shifts; Sam and Dean would alternate staying with whoever was watching Cas (and, again, Dean thought these ladies could give lessons to the CIA) and following one or more of the others to some kind of group briefing.

Neither could get close enough to figure out what, exactly, they were up to, though.

But Dean…. He was starting to get worried.

++

Jack came rushing in the next morning, looking flushed with panic.

He was holding something in one hand, and Dean was on his feet, ready to kick the shit out of anybody who’d been bugging the kid (bad enough somebody had been harassing Cas, but he was a grown angel; Jack wasn’t even _two_ ).

Then Jack dropped what he was holding onto the table, and Dean stared at it.

Sam leaned in, and poked the item with the pen he was using to take notes from one of the older tomes.

“It’s a tape measure.”

Jack stared at it. “I thought….one of them was sneaking up on Cas with it. I pretended to bump into her and I snatched it up before she could see where it’d gone.”

Dean was so busy fixated on the tape measure that he missed the hopeful look Jack gave him, as if awaiting acknowledgement, approval.

“Okay, Jack,” Sam said. “You did good. Do you know which of them it was?”

Jack nodded. “Muriel, I think? The one with the…”

“Skirt,” Dean finished. He picked up the tape measure. Something was pulling itself together in his head.

The _stalking_. The glasses. Now, a tape measure.

And…. He hadn’t thought of it, but that night, when Muriel and her friends had been telling them what their life had been before, during, and after the Apocalypse, they’d also been very cleverly pumping them for info.

On them, the bunker, their lives.

On Cas. And Dean remembered mentioning Cas’s wings, not going into great detail, but apparently going into enough.

“Played us like a six string,” he said, and shook his head in amusement. “Damn.”

Sam looked worried. “Dean. How the hell are they threatening Cas with a...with a _tape measure_? Are we kicking them out?”

Dean stuffed the tape measure in his pocket. “Nah, Sam. I don’t think it’s gonna come to that.”

++

The next morning, there were two large brown paper parcels, done up with string, sitting on the library table.

Dean studied them carefully, did a few basic ‘defusing’ spells on them, just in case, and then had Jack go get Cas.

When their angel saw the parcels, he frowned.

“What are those?”

Dean held up the card, with _Castiel_ written in a neat hand.

“They’re presents, I think. For you.”

Cas tilted his head, and Dean felt a deep stab of guilt. He didn’t know about before Cas had met them, but in the ten years plus they’d known him, Dean realised they’d never once given him anything.

Except grief. That they’d gifted to him in spades.

Cas’s first present came from a group of strangers he’d met only a couple of weeks before.

He motioned the angel over. “They’re okay. And, uh, I think we’ve solved your old lady stalker problem.”

Cas picked up the first parcel, and gently squeezed it. “It feels...soft.”

Dean nodded. “Yeah. Go on, open them up. I’m not sure…. How much good they’re gonna do you, but…. Let’s see, okay?”

++

“Wing..sweaters? They knitted him _wing sweaters_?”

Dean drained the last of his coffee, put the cup down, nodded. “That’s why they were following him, why they lifted the glasses from the armoury. They were trying to figure out his...wing size.”

Sam chuckled. “Wing sweaters.”

“Hey,” Dean protested. “Look, you know, I know, _Cas_ knows, he’s not exactly going to get much use out of them. But you remember that night they were telling us about their lives before those fucking butchers turned up? And we mentioned Cas’s wings, and that there were pretty much bone, now?”

Sam nodded. “Yeah. Still can’t believe they lived like that. That they survived.”

Dean could believe it. He was starting to see those ladies in a different light. “I guess they thought since we got sweaters, Cas should too, but ones he’d really need.”

“I guess that makes more sense than one of them trying to sneak up on him and choke him with a tape measure.”

Now it was Dean’s turn to chuckle. “I guess. Gotta hand it to them, though; that was like some kind of textbook military shit right there.”

“Maybe next time we’ve got a hunt, we should take them along.”

Dean thought about it, those savvy, sneaky, gutsy ladies.

“I kind of feel like _they’d _be taking us.”__

__++_ _

__Cas did indeed wear the wing sweaters. Dean even managed to get a picture._ _


End file.
